Who Are Our Expert Panelists?

We are extremely lucky to have so many talented and experienced individuals as part of our community. Join the discussion.

Ghazal Asif, Vice President, WW Channels at AppDynamics, Cisco is a passionate leader who champions diversity within the workplace.
Ghazal recently joined AppDynamics, Cisco’s $3.7B Software acquisition to build and grow AppD’s WW Channels Org. As part of her role, Ghazal has led a number of profitability and enablement programs to drive incremental growth for AppD.
Prior to joining AppDynamics, Ghazal led Cisco Meraki’s Global Channel Sales organization. The team enabled key Cisco partners to build, develop and grow their Meraki practice developing new routes to profitability. Ghazal and her team led the strategy and execution of activities ranging from lead generation campaigns, bespoke partner training, and enablement. The channel was a key contributor in Meraki’s growth from $100M to $1B in four years.

Karen Catlin, After spending 25 years building software products, Karen Catlin is now an advocate for women in the tech industry. She’s a leadership coach, a keynote and TEDx speaker, and co-author of “Present! A Techie’s Guide to Public Speaking.” She also facilitates a women’s forum at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Formerly, Karen was a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe.

In 2015, the California State Assembly honored her with the Wonder Women Tech Innovator Award for outstanding achievements in business and technology and for being a role model for women. Karen holds a computer science degree from Brown University and serves as an advisor to Brown’s Computer Science Diversity Initiative. She’s also on the Advisory Boards for The Women’s CLUB of Silicon Valley, WEST (Women Entering & Staying in Technology), and Women Serve on Boards. Follow Karen on Twitter: @kecatlin

Nahid Samsami, Senior Product Manager, Heroku/Salesforce, is a Senior Product Manager at Heroku, a Platform-as-a-Service that is part of Salesforce. Her surface area includes the Elements marketplace, 3rd party integrations, and the command-line interface. She is a recipient of the Salesforce Technology & Product All-Star Award. Previously, Nahid led product management at Keen IO, acquired by Scaleworks, and was a Senior Product Manager at Playdom, acquired by The Walt Disney Company. She started her career as a management consultant at Bain & Company.

Nahid is passionate about the recruiting and retention of women in technology. She’s served as a mentor to women making a career change into product management and has authored a book on finding a first role (“Get a Job as a Product Manager”.)

Vanessa Shaw is founder of Human Side of Tech, through which she advises forward thinking thinking executives and HR leaders to operate their companies with a culture-first approach, so that they can turn challenge into opportunity when facing rapid growth, digital disruption and culture change. She believes that everyone deserves to have a great place to work. Through events, writing and speaking she helps you uncover how to create a company culture where employees are inspired to do their best work and supported to thrive. She writes about company culture and employee experience, showcasing case studies, stories and interviews from leading companies who are driving the future of work. As part of her workplace culture global tour, she has visited several dozen company headquarters such as Facebook, Spotify, Airbnb, IDEO and more.

She is creator and producer of Workplace Lab, a community of professionals and series of events helping the most innovative professionals design workplace cultures their proud to work in. Follow her updates@HumanSideofTech.

Daryn Kelley, is a Business Development (“BD”) Manager at Box, the Cloud Content Management company that empowers enterprises to revolutionize how they work by securely connecting their people, information and applications. As a BD Manager, Daryn works hand in hand with key leading enterprise SaaS companies to define partnership strategies. In addition, she works cross-functionally across the organization to identify growth opportunities for Box and partners in the cloud technology space.

Passionate about creating an inclusive workplace culture and advocating for women in the industry, Daryn was also formerly Co-Chair of the Box Women’s Network (BWN). In this role, Daryn lead BWN globally to provide professional and personal development opportunities focused on women empowerment and community development across Box.

Daryn is a graduate of UC Berkeley where she received her BA in Sociology and Minor in Education. She is a native to the Bay Area and currently lives in the East Bay.